What Francesca Bridgerton and a D-Day Veteran Discovered About Grief

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This is documentary first, the deep dive, where I take an insight from a recent podcast conversation, plummet steps and see what gold we can bring to the surface. I'm Christian Taylor. Let's dive in. I was watching Bridgerton the other night. Now don't judge me, just stay with me. When the story turned to very deep and unfortunately familiar territory. In season four, episode seven called the Beyond, Francesca Bridgerton's husband, John, retires for an afternoon nap with a headache, sadly never to wake again. After his passing, Francesca went into kind of a stoic trance, doing all the things she thought she should do, all the proper motions of mourning. And from the outside, you can see it's her way of avoiding the emotions that are just waiting to overwhelm her. John's cousin, Michaela, on the other hand, who is Scottish, wants to celebrate his life with a party. That's their custom in Scotland. But Francesca squirms the idea until she doesn't. After all the formal funeral rites are passed, She goes to Michaela and says, I thought if I acted as if I was fine, I would be, but I'm exhausted. I want to feel joy. So they plan a celebration. Those who love John come together to share food and drink and tell stories that make everyone smile and laugh.

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Now, when Francesca speaks, she starts with the pain, how unjust it was that a simple headache took such a good man so young. Then she says, but that is not how I wish to remember him. She begins to recall all the things he brought into her life. Kindness, joy, a certain kind of knowing, and everything he meant to her. She ends her tribute to her husband with these words, I may ache, but the good John brought into my life far outweighs the pain that I am feeling now. I would not change it. The scene ends with Michaela teaching everyone a Scottish dance that she and John learned as children. And this story has stayed with me over the past week or so. I wasn't quite sure why. until I sat down to contemplate this deep dive. In last week's documentary first episode number 273, which you should listen to, I had a conversation with Jake Schroeder. Now Jake runs the D-Day Leadership Academy where he brings high school kids to Normandy to learn leadership skills through the stories of D-Day. He's a former professional musician and youth sports director and one of the most thoughtful people I have ever talked to about what it means to keep going when everything else says you should quit. Now during our conversation, We talked about something that's pretty counterintuitive that we've both experienced when we were in Normandy. Jake has been taking veterans back to the D-Day beaches for years, and he started wondering something a lot of Americans wonder when they visit Normandy.

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Is it disrespectful to recreate there, to swim, to play, to sunbathe on the sand where men bled and died? These are hallowed features, you know. Shouldn't we be solemn and somber, crying and contemplative? So... He started asking the veterans, not one or two, more than 20 men who had actually fought on those beaches. Every veteran had similar answers to the question, but one veteran's response summed them all up in four words. Jake was at Utah beach with Anthony Malin, an LST driver who had landed there on D-Day. And there were children playing in the water, splashing, squealing, doing what kids do at the beach. And Anthony began to cry. Jake asked him how he felt about people recreating on Utah Beach. And Anthony looked at him like the answer was the most obvious thing in the world and said, that's why we came. Take a listen. And I asked no less than 20 veterans as I went over there with them and four of them on the beach at different times. Anthony Malin, who was an LST driver that landed at Utah. And we were down at Utah Beach and he saw these kids playing and just started crying. And I said, I said, how do you feel about people recreating on Utah Beach. And he's like, he looked at me like, well, that's why we came.

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That's what they all said. Many veterans said the same thing. Their favorite part of returning to those beaches wasn't the ceremonies. It wasn't the salutes. It was watching the children play. And I agree with Jake. I've never been to Normandy in August and I'm longing to go to take full advantage of what so many gave their lives for so that I might enjoy it. And I've been thinking about that. about what made Aunt They-Mail-And-Cry. You know, she wasn't shedding tears of sorrow, pain, or loss. They were tears of joy, pleasure, pain. Think about what he was holding in that moment. He's standing on sand where his friends had died. He can see it. I'm sure he can see it, hear it, maybe even smell it. Every time he stood there, the blood, the chaos, the horror of that day, I've heard from veterans that experience never leaves you. And right in front of him at the same frame, children are swimming and laughing and completely unaware of what happened in those same waters over 80 years earlier. Those tears were about what the sacrifice had you born. All the death, the pain, all the horror, it wasn't for nothing. The sacrifices meant something. They meant everything. The beaches are free. The children are free. They can play there because young men were willing to die there. And here was the living proof splashing in the water.

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right in front of him. But here's what's been nagging at me. If seeing that joy is what gave Anthony Maylon peace about what he and his friends went through, then why is our first instinct to suppress our joy at their sacrifice? Why do we default to solemnity when we stand on ground that was purchased specifically so that joy could exist there? Sometimes I think maybe we have reverence upside down. We think it means silence, stillness, gravity, and sometimes it does. But the people who actually paid the price, the people who have the most right to demand solemnity, they're the ones saying, no, play, laugh. That was the whole point. Swimming on Utah Beach in August is as honoring as visiting the graves at the Normandy American Cemetery. It's just a different way to show honor. Neither is wrong. Neither is better. Both are valid ways to thank the veterans for what they did. Now, I want to stay with Anthony Malin for a moment because What he was doing on that beach has a name. He just didn't know it. Now my mom passed away unexpectedly last June. It was sudden and it crushed me. And in the months that followed, I remembered a book I once heard about called A Greed Observed by C.S. Lewis. I was so very sad and I wondered if it might help me.

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It did. It might help you too if you've ever lost someone. For those who don't know the book, Lewis wrote it after his wife Joy Davidman died of cancer. They'd only been married for a few years. It was his grief journal, like raw, furious, sometimes terrifying. He calls God a cosmic sadist. He describes grief as feeling like fear, the same fluttering the stomach, the same relentlessness. He compares it to a bomber dropping its payload every time it comes around again. It's absolutely very apt in my opinion. It's one of the most honest things ever written about loss, if you ask me. And it met me right where I was. But here's what connects Lewis to that beach in Normandy. Toward the end of the book. After he's been through the worst of it, Lewis makes a discovery. He notices that his all-consuming, all-encompassing grief isn't bringing him any closer to his wife. It's actually doing the opposite. It's cutting him off from her. He notices that it's in the moments when he feels the least sorrow. Getting into his morning bath, for example, the joy suddenly rushes into his mind full of her reality. Not shrunken down by his misery, not turned into a symbol of his pain, but as she actually was. vivid whole herself. His grief had been doing to Joy what we do to sacred places. It was making her solemn small.

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It was turning her into a monument instead of a person. And then Lewis writes a line that I think we would all do good to remember. Praise is the mode of love, which always has some element of joy in it. Now, I had to think a little bit before I really understood what that line meant, so let me try to unpack it for you. Lewis is saying that there are different ways to love someone that you've lost. So when you grieve them, you're focused on the absence, the hole in your heart, the empty chair, what's missing. That is love, but it's expressed as pain. When you praise them, when you talk about who they were, what they brought into the world, what is good and true about them, that is also love. That's love focused on fullness instead of absence. And Lewis says that whenever love takes that form or That mode, as he calls it, whenever it becomes praise, joy is baked into it. You can't praise someone you love without some part of you lighting up. It's filled into the act itself. That is exactly what Francesca discovered in Bridgerton. She spent the first half of the episode grieving John, love as pain, focused on the lost. But when she stood up and said, that's not how I wish to remember him, and started thinking about what he brought into her life, That was praise.

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Same love, different mode. And Joy showed up inside it without her even having to force it. And that's exactly what Anthony Malin was doing on Utah Beach. He wasn't grieving his fallen friends. Not at that moment. He was watching children play and seeing the fruit of what his friends gave their lives for. He was seeing who they were and what they accomplished. That's praise. And Joy was right there in the tears. Lewis had to drag himself through months of darkness. So did I. and maybe so did you if you've lost someone, to discover what those D-Day veterans already knew standing on that sand. Grief that stays locked in solemnity eventually becomes a cage. It shrinks the people you love into monuments, but praise brings them back to you. Whole and joy comes with it. So what does this have to do with filmmaking? Well, I think it has a lot to do with it. And I think it comes down to responsibility. I've talked on this show before about the responsibility we carry as filmmakers toward our audiences. People learn how to deal with things in real life by watching others deal with them on the screen. Film models behavior for its audiences. It shows them what's possible. And right now, when we tell stories about suffering, war, loss, and justice trauma, often we model one response, salinity, muted color grades, slow piano, long pauses on weathered faces.

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We treat our subjects like they're made of porcelain and sometimes that is appropriate. I'm not dismissing that approach. But if that's the only approach we ever model, what are we teaching our audiences? That solemnity is the only acceptable way to honor sacrifice. That grief should stay quiet and controlled. That joy has no place in a story about loss. Bridgerton modeled something different. It showed an audience that a woman could say, wanna feel joy. In the middle of devastating grief, and that it wasn't disrespectful, it was healing. When Francesca stood up and chose praise of her mourning, she gave every viewer permission to consider doing the same thing in their own lives. In my film, The Girl Who Wore Freedom, I endeavored to do that same thing. The story is about what grew in the soil that was soaked with blood, the gratitude, the love between the French and the Americans, the celebrations that have lasted over 80 years, the joy. And when people tell me what they remember about my film, It's never the archival footage. It's the human moments, the reunions, the tears of gratitude. It's the veteran who didn't want to go to ceremonies because he was afraid the French would be angry about all the devastation he caused. It was him wanting to dance all night after the French woman whose town he destroyed thanked him for her freedom.

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Those are the moments of praise. They are the mode of love that has joy in it. And they're what stayed with people. So here's my challenge to you filmmakers out there. What if we modeled another way? What if we showed our audiences that joy and grief can live in the same frame? That praise is as valid a response to loss as mourning? That you can honor the dead by celebrating what their sacrifice made possible? What if we gave people permission to dance? Now, there's another author I want to introduce you to before I go. G.K. Chesterton. He was a massive influence on CS Lewis. He wrote something in 1908 that I think ties all this together. In his book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton argued that the ancient pagans thought about things a certain way. They were cheerful about the small things. Wine, food, spring. But when they looked at the big questions, why do we suffer? Is there anything after death? Does any of life matter? They disfavored. Christianity, he said, reversed it entirely. It made sadness something small, and it made joy something enormous. His exact phrase was, joy is the gigantic secret. I love that. Not the small comfort, not the silver lining, the gigantic secret, the thing hidden in plain sight that's bigger than the suffering, not smaller.

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And I think he's describing exactly what happens on Utah Beach. A veteran watches children play, and he sees the gigantic secret. That joy is the purpose of the whole enterprise. The war wasn't fought so that beaches could become museums. It was fought so that beaches could be beaches again. We're trained to think the big, serious, important work lives in darkness and pain. And darkness and pain matter. But maybe the gigantic secret of filmmaking is the same one Chesterton found in Christianity and Lewis found in his grief and 20 plus D-Day veterans found on a beach in Normandy. Joy is bigger than the pain. And the most powerful story we can tell might not be about the suffering. It might be about the moment after, when someone starts to live again. So the next time you're telling a story about people who've suffered, consider this. There might be more to the story than the wound. There might be something growing from it. The sacrifice might already be bearing fruit, and that fruit might look like children on a beach. Because a veteran standing on Utah Beach will tell you, the most sacred thing on that sand isn't a monument. It's a kid squealing in the water. Joy isn't the opposite of honoring sacrifice.

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It's the completion of it. That's. the gigantic secret. And now you know it too. I'm Christian Taylor. This has been Documentary First The Deep Dive. I'll see you next time. Hey everybody, thanks for spending a few minutes with me on the deep dive. If you liked this, subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And check out the full Documentary First podcast for longer conversations with the filmmakers behind the docs you love. You can find both shows wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you want to support what we're doing, visit DocumentaryFirst.com. We'll see you next time.